Doing Oral History

By Donald A. Ritchie

Book Overview

Doing Oral History is considered the premier guidebook to oral history, used by professional oral historians, public historians, archivists, and genealogists as a core text in college courses and throughout the public history community. Over the past decades, the development of digital audio and video recording technology has continued to alter the practice of oral history, making it even easier to produce quality recordings and to disseminate them on the Internet. This basic manual offers detailed advice on setting up an oral history project, conducting interviews, making video recordings, preserving oral history collections in archives and libraries, and teaching and presenting oral history.
Using the existing Q&A format, the third edition asks new questions and augments previous answers with new material, particularly in these areas:
1. Technology: As before, the book avoids recommending specific equipment, but weighs the merits of the types of technology available for audio and video recording, transcription, preservation, and dissemination. Information about web sites is expanded, and more discussion is provided about how other oral history projects have posted their interviews online.
2. Teaching: The new edition addresses the use of oral history in online teaching. It also expands the discussion of Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) with the latest information about compliance issues.
3. Presentation: Once interviews have been conducted, there are many opportunities for creative presentation. There is much new material available on innovative forms of presentation developed over the last decade, including interpretive dance and other public performances.
4. Legal considerations: The recent Boston College case, in which the courts have ruled that Irish police should have access to sealed oral history transcripts, has re-focused attention on the problems of protecting donor restrictions. The new edition offers case studies from the past decade.
5. Theory and Memory: As a beginner's manual, Doing Oral History has not dealt extensively with theoretical issues, on the grounds that these emerge best from practice. But the third edition includes the latest thinking about memory and provides a sample of some of the theoretical issues surrounding oral sources. It will include examples of increased studies into catastrophe and trauma, and the special considerations these have generated for interviewers.
6. Internationalism: Perhaps the biggest development in the past decade has been the spreading of oral history around the world, facilitated in part by the International Oral History Association. New oral history projects have developed in areas that have undergone social and political upheavals, where the traditional archives reflect the old regimes, particularly in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Asia, Africa, and Latin America. The third edition includes many more references to non-U.S. projects that will still be relevant to an American audience.
These changes make the third edition of Doing Oral History an even more useful tool for beginners, teachers, archivists, and all those oral history managers who have inherited older collections that must be converted to the latest technology.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0199329338
• ISBN13: 9780199329335
• Release Date: October 2014
• Publisher: OUP Us
• Length: 368 Pages
• Weight: 1.20 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.1" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

Oral history of family is priceless!

We first heard about this book on the radio back in early 1990s...it is a marvelous tool to guide an interview of grandparent or parent, or even self, to record one's memories and family history. The book provided a concise outline to follow so that family history, stories, and memories can be passed down on DVD or CD. We have used it with our parents and given copies to siblings and grandchildren, and learned the benefit following the passing of a loved one - priceless! We even plan to do ourselves for our children. Probably the best and most unique legacy to leave!

The methods of oral history

David Remnick's Lenin's Tomb deals with the fledgling days of the Soviet Union's collapse. Remnick interviews numerous people ranging from coal miners to Stalin's grandson, Yevgeny Djugashvili. Remnick's interview with Djugashvili ends with a toast; Djugashvili's toast is basically an apotheosis to Stalin, and ends with "to Stalin!" Remnick describes a wave of nausea, but complied with the toast. Remnick's professionalism, however difficult, is an example of the methods and ethics of conducting an interview, and the basis of Donald A. Ritchie's Doing Oral History. Ritchie's manual is structured as an interview, with questions that address the methods and ethics of conducting an oral history interview. Ritchie's manual places interviews in the social sciences and away from journalism. Doing Oral History is a fundamental manual on how to proceed with an interview, and for it to be grounded in method and ethics. Ritchie defines oral history: "Memory is the core of oral history, from which meaning can be extracted and preserved. Simply put, oral history collects memories and personal commentaries of historical significance through recorded interviews" (19). Ritchie's manual provides not only the legal and technical concerns of doing an oral history interview, but the fundamental methods of conducting a successful interview. The interviewee is the focus, and should not be forced into answers, because forceful interviewers risk inaccurate responses (122). The impulse to ask hard questions must be tempered, and creatively asked; Ritchie suggests quoting from another source, and allow the interviewee to respond to the quote instead of forceful questions. These examples of methodology and ethics while interviewing is the core of Doing Oral History, and the purpose is to provide future researchers with the most accurate interview that can be made; limiting disruptive variables such as forceful questions, and providing a primary source that can be trusted. Not only does Ritchie's manual describe the methods and ethics of doing oral history, but the fundamental reason for it. The sole purpose to record interviews is to deposit them into an archive for future research (111). The future researchers have more liberty to criticize and analyze the interviewee, than the interviewer originally had (122). Researchers that use oral history interviews can analyze them discretely like any source, and not be concerned necessarily with the feelings of the interviewee. The interview itself can be accurately studied, if it follows the methods and ethics of Doing Oral History; this manual presents the methods and concerns of a social scientist, and provides future researchers a source that can be trusted if its methods are followed. Donald A. Ritchie's Doing Oral History is a necessary manual to consult before engaging in an oral history interview. It provides the methods, ethics, and technical advice, to begin an interview. Beyond the meth

Know what you're doing

This book delivers on what it promises. Beware, however, that while the author addresses interviews conducted by individual researchers, the book isn't much good for people looking to do that sort of work. Oral history is a more specific kind of work than what your ninth grade history teacher may have led you to believe (go figure!). I still think that a chapter addressing interview techniques would have been appropriate in the structure of the whole book. As it is, the text is written in q & a format, which annoyed me slightly, but it serves. Verdict: useful for anyone looking to do oral history per se and wanting a guide to the various theoretical and practical issues involved.

The ABCs of Oral History

Ritchie covers the topic like a blanket. Everything from how to manage one's collection and stay out of legal trouble with the interviewee (and anyone you may discuss); down to remembering to punch out the little tabs on the back of each cassette in order to prevent accidental erasure.This is a very complete and very practical guide to the processes and thinking of our country's oral historians from an author who's been in the middle of some pretty interesting stories.